It’s a Battlefield (20 page)

‘Good driving that,' Jules said, and she opened her eyes while he continued to boast in an uncertain voice that there were not many drivers who would have avoided a collision. ‘It gave those other fellows a start. If I'd lost my nerve –' The arrow waggled, fell, the hedges bobbed slowly up and down, a farm, the first house. ‘I believe you were scared,' Jules said. He took a cigarette out of his packet to show how unconcerned he was, but the match he struck wavered and went out. He forgot to light another because they had arrived.

He went on boasting all the way upstairs. He stood between the bed and the washstand and boasted. He was such a driver, he was such a regular fellow, he had nerve enough for two. She sat on the bed and made up her face and felt a faint nausea. He stretched out his hand to prove his words and she smiled when all the tension of his muscles could not prevent it shaking. ‘You couldn't hold a tea-cup,' she said.

‘You ought to be grateful,' he told her in his light cocksure conceited manner. ‘That was driving.' She thought at first that like other men he was talking to hide his shyness, that he had lost his confidence now that he was alone with her, but he was boasting because he was happy, because he had been scared, because he had thought the car would crash and he would be alone again with Conder and the café. Never for a moment had it occurred to him that his own life was in danger. It was too vibrant now to be cut short like that, too certain of what it wanted.

‘Jules,' she said. ‘Jules, can't you wait?' but she had no wish to wait, she welcomed him: she only regretted the promptitude of the embrace when it was so quickly finished that it might have been no more than the gesture he had made her in the park, a salutation across the street. He was with her, he was in her, he was away from her, brushing his hair before the glass, whistling a tune.

‘Oh, stop it,' she said. He glared at her; he had an idea that he had not satisfied, and he was irritated. He would have been humiliated but for the thought that there were months and years ahead; they were going to marry; he would do better next time. The window was open, and he could smell bacon frying in the kitchen below. ‘Eggs and bacon,' he said, ‘I'm hungry.' He forgot for a moment what they had just been doing; there was so little to remind him of it, now that his body was quiet again.

She said: ‘I'm not hungry,' sullenly.

‘If only,' he said, remembering everything, the legacy, the drive, Kay on the bed, ‘there was something to do. I don't know why we came out here. We might have gone to the pictures, had a party.' He spun round to the mirror to form a quick image of himself in a hired dinner jacket, opening a bottle, proposing a toast, shaking hands, ‘meet my fiancée'.

‘You could have had your friends in,' he said, ‘and we'd have announced –' but the concerted opinion of Petit Tourville restrained him. ‘My legacy.'

Kay lay on her back with her legs crossed and her eyes half closed. She loved him and had found that he had given her less pleasure than many chance companions. You expected such a damned lot from love, a unique excitement, a quality of everlastingness; no value remained unshaken when love was this: Jules with you and then Jules further away than he had ever been, cute and cocksure and self-satisfied, studying his face in a mirror.

‘You talk such a hell of a lot,' she said, ‘about that legacy. £150 isn't much. I'd show you how to get through it inside a week. Why, I've known men who've earned that every week,' she said, lying desperately with the idea that if she could destroy his thought of the legacy, he would be once again Jules dissatisfied, Jules who had a boss and must work in the morning like herself, the hopelessly lost Jules, who waited outside a cinema, while she drove off with Mr Surrogate, inarticulate, with no realization that she was crazy for him, that she was hungry, that she would love him anywhere, anyhow. ‘Every week,' she said, ‘God's truth I have.'

He blinked at her. ‘Spend it in a week?'

‘Any girl would show you.' She could not have pricked the bubble of his conceit more effectually. He left the mirror altogether and came to the foot of the bed; this was the Jules of the café, the Jules between the tea urn and the till, the Jules she loved. Never mind now that he had not satisfied her, she lay back and sighed with happiness, dreaming of the night and other nights. It was almost possible to believe that she might give up her friends for him; if he asked her, marry him. For a year or two they would be perfectly happy; she would not go to the factory; and then when they were no longer crazy about each other, thank God you could give each other up; a friend of hers had got a divorce for five pounds. But Jules was a Catholic. ‘Do Catholics divorce each other?' She had not meant to speak aloud.

‘No,' he said furiously, ‘no.' It seemed to him that he had grossly exaggerated his love for her; it was a feeling one got until one had had the girl, and then it went; what was worse, he had exaggerated the value of his legacy. She was right; a girl could run through it in a week: his father was right: ‘Government securities' – five pounds a year; it was better than spending it. He began to count up what he had already spent that day. If I drove her back now and cancelled the room. But he shrank from the loneliness of the night which would follow. Besides, he told himself, I have not decided. I can still ask her tonight, tomorrow morning.

‘I'm going downstairs,' he said, ‘to see if supper's ready.' He opened the door, loneliness was in the dark passage, he stumbled on the unlit stairs, loneliness round his feet. Even the room below with the table spread for their supper was empty, so that he turned to call to her: ‘Come quick,' but thought better of it. The fire was laid, but needed a match. He had no match and he felt in his pocket for a spill to light from the gas. This was not as he had intended: ‘Meet Ern. Haven't you met, Bill? Don't you know –' He could hear her moving slow-footed overhead, but he was satisfied in the body, he was uninterested. It was a very lonely state, satisfaction. He told himself again, I can always ask her tonight, but he knew quite well that he would be as silent on that subject as the room was silent, the passage, the stairs.

The petition paper for Drover's release crinkled into flame. He bent and held it to the fire.

*

It had needed all Conrad's courage to follow the resolution he had formed in the night, when he had lain awake and listened to Milly crying, even as far as the street. A policeman passed; it was odd how quickly one became afraid of the law, but when he had got what he wanted, he would fear no one.

What shall I do with it?

What excuse shall I give?

What's the good of it?'

But he had not had enough sleep to answer questions. Somebody touched his arm, pushed him a little to one side, and went on down the pavement. Again he felt the wild anger, the hatred, as when he heard the jokers outside the Berkeley. They didn't know me, they didn't notice me, but I know one of them all right, I'd seen him in court day after day, yellow in the face, old, worn-out, watching Jim in the dock, Jim who was young and fresh and as good as dead.

He put out his hand and pulled the bell and heard the iron jangle behind the barred and shuttered windows, behind the strips of scarlet print: ‘Sale. Premises Damaged by Fire.' I've done it now, he thought, I've set something going that must go on, and a moment later while the echoes died, he was thinking again of the Assistant Commissioner and of how a word from that man might have saved Jim; if the police evidence had been given a little more sympathetically, if they had admitted to having clubbed women, the jury would have recommended him to mercy.

Then again Milly was in his arms, they were struggling in the bed, she was crying and close to him, he experienced the pitiful pleasure of their union.

‘Mr Bernay?'

‘Come inside.'

He was so absorbed in Milly's misery, the idea of how empty her life must be for her to accept his love, that he did not notice for some minutes Mr Bernay's secrecy and promptitude. It only came to him when he sat down opposite the long polished empty face and Mr Bernay asked him non-committally in what he could serve him: ‘I don't think I know –' He wore a black tail-coat and showed lengths of stiff white cuffs. These he presently shot with an air of getting down to business and remarked: ‘I was just off to church.'

Conrad said: ‘I see you have a sale of your old stock.'

‘Damaged by fire,' Mr Bernay corrected him.

‘Weren't you insured?'

‘That's typical of me,' Mr Bernay said. ‘I'm too sociable. I forget things. Your face now –'

Conrad said: ‘You don't know me. I belong to the Regal Assurance Company,' and noted with pleasure a faint unease touch the wide white face, like the shadow of a man in a cinema crossing the empty screen.

Mr Bernay said: ‘I don't know why you come to see me on a Sunday.'

‘Privately,' Conrad said. ‘I thought that as you'd had dealings with my firm, you might oblige me. I wanted to buy something cheap.'

Mr Bernay watched him and Conrad waited. He knew the kind of thoughts which were passing now through the other's head, and the knowledge gave him the sense of power. The other was neatly dressed, was well-off, was a Church-goer, wore starched cuffs on a Sunday, but a few words had rendered him speechless. Mr Bernay began to pick his nails.

‘We were surprised,' Conrad said, ‘that you didn't press your claim.'

‘I couldn't wait,' Mr Bernay said, ‘the damage was trifling: you insurance companies are so slow. What is it you want?'

‘A revolver.'

Mr Bernay said: ‘Of course, I have to see your licence. In any case, I don't believe I have one.'

‘I haven't got a licence.'

‘Why do you want one?'

‘I'm so much alone.'

‘Ah,' Mr Bernay said, leaning back behind the desk, grasping, as it were, with both hands this opportunity for assertion, ‘I don't understand that. I, you see, am never alone.' His face was temporarily lighted by the lamps of innumerable social occasions. He permitted Conrad to glimpse vistas of red carpet, to stare like an outcast through the lit windows from his own darkness and loneliness. For he was lonely, as lonely as he had ever been in spite of his passion and what he would once have considered his success. There had been times when he had thought that to be a woman's lover would armour anyone against shame, when there had seemed promise of infinite confidence in one short movement. Now he knew that he needed more than a physical act. He wanted years together.

‘Sometimes,' Mr Bernay said, ‘I'd just like to creep away. Far from the madding crowd,' Mr Bernay said, shooting his cuffs. His large soft trustless eyes swept Conrad like a couple of arc lamps, picking out his misery and loneliness. ‘There's such a thing,' Mr Bernay said, ‘as too many friends.' He pretended to envy Conrad his solitary condition as a parsimonious millionaire turns off a tramp with words of envy for his irresponsibility.

‘The revolver,' Conrad said. But Mr Bernay had quite recovered; he was again the social figure. It was impossible to suspect that behind that blank respectable façade there had ever been a pawnbroker afraid of questions.

‘You must get a licence. How can I tell what you might be up to? Violence. Anything. Look at the way you've come to me, on a Sunday when the shutters are up. And your hand. Look how it's shaking. Your nerves are all upset, you ought to have a tonic. You aren't fit to be out, let alone with a revolver.'

In the shop several clocks began to strike the hour. ‘There,' Mr Bernay said. ‘I'm too late for church.'

‘Why should you have scruples?' Conrad said. ‘I know all about you. I've handled all the papers about your fire.' It had seemed to him during the night a very easy thing to get what he wanted from the pawnbroker. It was to have been a kind of safe blackmail; he had pictured a very frightened dealer, not Mr Bernay with his cuffs and his patronage and his broad shining face and his blandness.

Mr Bernay said gently: ‘I'll report you to your firm. You have driven me to it. I don't like doing harm to anyone. I'm as good a Christian as the next man.'

‘I'm not asking you to do it for nothing.'

‘It's your tone I dislike,' the pawnbroker said. ‘I'd stretch a point for a friend (and I tell you there aren't many men with a bigger acquaintance than mine), when I wouldn't raise a little finger for an enemy. Not a little finger.' The large soft eyes seemed to push Conrad very far into the distance, until he was a minute figure on the very horizon of Mr Bernay's consciousness; with such a small figure one could do anything; raise a hand, it would be sufficient reproof, a smile would be sufficient forgiveness, or if one were, after all, to do business, somebody so inconsiderable could not complain at the hardest bargain.

‘I didn't mean any harm,' Conrad said. It seemed to him now that he wanted the weapon more than anything else in life; he had wanted love, but he had had that; it was over.

‘What do you want it for?'

‘Against an emergency.' It was true; he had no clear idea of its use; there were people he hated, his fellow-clerks, the director's nephew, the manager, the police commissioner, the man who pushed him on the pavement, but he did not really want to kill these people any more than he wanted to kill himself. Less, because he had more reason to hate himself; he loved his brother and he had done his brother what people seemed to consider the bitterest of wrongs. It had been difficult to believe in the wrong during the commission; it had been so easy, so short, so lovely, so unsatisfying, but afterwards, awake and silent in bed, he had pasted the proper labels on his memory of it. ‘A mortal sin.' ‘The bitterest wrong.' ‘A broken commandment.' But the labels were not his; he had taken them from others; others had made the rules by which he suffered; it was unfair that they should leave him so alone and yet make the rules which governed him. It was as if a man marooned must still order his life according to the regulations of his ship.